Anyone else notice the steep price this year? 500$ for a team of 3? The price keeps climbing every year and now its almost 200$ per person. They are becoming money hungry
Sometimes things take off blindly and although the original good intentions remain, the whole process can become masked.
At first, it was but a few guys, probably free. And it was all about catching sharks and tagging them and also getting swath samples for biologist, which was great. It was fun, exciting and the thrill mixed with the intoxication of giving something back to science was stellar. It got bigger and bigger, wider and wider, consuming a greater part of the Florida coast with the teams doing their thing...which was catching sharks and tagging them....don't know about the swath sampling...maybe that dropped off.
So, now, big time shark fishing will flood the coast again which will, mark my words, mess it up for all of us because last year events like this (because they were so big and wide spread and so unregulated) were PLASTERED all over the news in a negative way, which fired the good citizens up to seek out some sort of sanctions against this rampant infestation of big, bad sharks being dragged upon their lovely beaches.
Thing is, municipalities LISTENED very acutely and some have already locked their gates. Others are politically cocked, so to speak, ready to pull the trigger. Another swarm of people, kinda like in the movie Jaws when all those boats piled into the harbor to hunt that fish, will be upon us soon.
Don't know about damage control this year. Hope they tell these guys to not liter our beaches with beer bottles, light fires, leave their dead bait all over the place, and hopefully kill no sharks only to bury them halfway up in the sand for all the tourist to see like they did last year.
Because if they don't get some kind of grip on this, the trigger will be pulled and land based shark fishing will suffer the blow.